Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia antartica (Symphony No. 7) & Symphony No. 9

While Vaughan Williams was composing the music for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, he began to feel that the story—a British team of polar explorers, tragically challenging unforgiving nature—could be the basis of an orchestral symphony. The result was to be the five-movement Sinfonia antartica, developing the film score’s pictorial style into a showcase of orchestral wizardry. Martyn Brabbins’ conducting paces the music on a grand scale, allowing every detail (especially of the intricate percussion writing) to be captured by state-of-the-art recorded sound, as in the central “Landscape” movement. Pitiless nature is represented by a wordless female chorus, with Elizabeth Watts’ lustrous solo soprano voice floating above the Antarctic wasteland like an angel of death. Vaughan Williams’ final symphony, the Ninth, is another somber masterpiece, with Brabbins searching out every corner of its brooding soundworld.